Did you get hoodwinked when it came to your backup and disaster recovery solution? You can admit it if you did – it happens to a lot of businesses.

You thought you were investing in a solution that would change
everything. Something that would make your life simpler, your backups
easier to handle, your recovery faster.
But then it turned out your
solution involved a lot of little solutions – a vendor that came with
half a dozen other different vendors attached. You had to negotiate
pricing, licensing, deliverables, support with all of them. The total
cost of ownership has been hard to get a grip on. You spend more time
than expected with each vendor, following up on small details and
chasing down unresolved issues. And when a problem arises, everyone
passes the buck, saying it must be that other vendor.

The BDR solution that was supposed to save you so much time seems to
be consuming more and more of it. Inevitably you stop managing each
aspect effectively because you just didn't account for the resources
required. And those high level objectives you hoped to achieve? They
look farther and farther away.

You're lost in multi-vendor chaos.

There's only one cure for this situation: to simplify your backup and
disaster recovery system as much as possible. By eliminating the
complexities of managing different teams, you can put more time and
money back in your life, and let your team devote themselves to more
interesting work.

A few tips will help streamline your solutions and your processes.

Evaluate your current situation.
Take a
look at where you’re spending time and where past disasters have stopped
your recovery. Sometimes what seems to be a minor part of your system
can be costing you more time, phone calls or meetings than you realize.
Before you can simplify, you need to identify where your system flows
smoothly and where it slows down and gets murky.

Choose a solution that takes care of everything – for real.
Maintaining
one relationship usually means lower costs, decreased risk and better
service. It’s easier to negotiate more favorable terms and develop a
true partnership where your vendor learns the needs and nuances of your
team, which sharpens their ability to provide great service. You have
several options here, like choosing a DRaaS solution where the experts
handle all the day-to-day tasks. And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention
at Quorum, we really do handle it all – archiving, recovery, testing,
you name it.

Get clear on price and value.
You may
have lived through this before: you decide on a BDR solution that seems
budget-friendly at first, and then random little add-ons keep nudging
the bill higher and higher. Elements you assumed were included, aren’t.
The lesson here? Don’t jump at the solution with the lowest price tag.
Look at the total value in terms of management, features, time. Will
your team be able to focus on revenue-driving activities? Does the SLA
promise a reduction in downtime and lost sales? Your team’s freedom to
innovate and focus on their core mission should always be the priority.

Prioritize communication.
Look for a
vendor you can talk to. These days we all have a dozen ways to contact
each other – yet too often, we can’t get a conversation with that one
person who can solve our problem. You want a vendor who will pick up the
phone and talk to you in a language you understand, instead of
relegating you to a third-party call center or refusing to take
responsibility.

Automate.
When you’re evaluating a new
backup and disaster recovery solution, don’t settle for promises of how
“easy” it will be. Be blunt and ask about automation. Is testing
automated? How much effort is involved in backing up and failing over?
All too often that “easy” solution involves more training and processes
than you realized – leading to difficulty down the road when disaster
hits and the two people who understand how to spin up a backup are both
MIA.

When it comes to vendors, less is usually more. Find the vendor who
can do it all and do it well, and you’ll find your own team empowered to
do a lot more.

NEWS on-Q

Want to stay up-to-date on the latest Quorum Customer News? We’d like that. Sign up for our quarterly newsletter below.